It's all connected! It's all connected! And why shouldn't Virginia Applejack fall for the kid from the first issue of Killers once he's grown up? It makes everything so neat and tidy, even if Lapham does skip over the actual romance because it'd be too hard to establish it. And even if Lapham does turn the guy's mom into a shrill knock-off of Virginia's evil mom.
There's still a lot of good stuff in the comic, maybe even some great stuff; the connections almost seem added later. Lapham really tries hard to make Killers, save Virginia, its own interconnected thing.
Why?
Because he still hasn't realized interconnected stories don't necessarily make something good.
It's a fine issue, but more of what I expected from Killers than Lapham has been doing. Until now, the nostalgia has been subtle. Here, it's forced. It's still above average until the desperate third act.
B
CREDITS
Sorry; writer, artist and letterer, David Lapham; editors, Renee Miller and Maria Lapham; publisher, Image Comics.
What’s strange about the feature is how much better Bates writes Elongated Man and Sue Dibney than he does Barry and the Flash. There’s a lot of charm to his characterizations of the Dibneys and it breathes a lot of life into the story.
This issue of C.O.W.L. doesn’t so much have scenes as it has snippets of scenes. The whole thing plays like a movie trailer for itself.
★★★
I almost want to cut this issue slack for the art; Jack Abel inking Val Mayerik is an interesting thing. Abel adds not just a lot of detail–to Man-Thing in particular–but comic expressions for most of the characters. Man-Thing all of a sudden seems to recognize its humor.
It’s a bridging issue. It’s got beautiful art, but it’s a bridging issue. Having a bridging issue on The Private Eye seems very strange because it’s self-published and digital and I’ve always assumed bridging issues were to meet some kind of publishing requirement or editorial mandate. Yet Vaughan does one here; maybe once you start doing them, you can’t stop.
Heck gets lazy on the strangest stuff for the feature in this issue. It’s not the super gorillas or all the different locations in Bates’s script… no, it’s the people. Whenever Heck is drawing a person, it just doesn’t work out. It’s like he spent all his time on everything else and rushed through the faces.
It’s not often I’m reading a superhero comic and think, why don’t they just call the cops, but really… they should have just called the cops.
One problem I can see Gerber having with Man-Thing is what to do on the regular issues, the ones where he has a somewhat ambitious narrative structure, but isn't doing anything fantastical. Gerber excels at the fantastical. This issue is not fantastical.
What do you do when your last issue goes off the rails? Well, if you're Rick Spears and you're writing The Auteur you do something really odd.
The super gorillas. I forgot about the super gorillas. If Bates likes writing anything more than strange applications of Flash’s powers, it’s got to be these super gorillas.
I don't know how it's possible, but somehow Anderson has sucked even more drama out of Clockwork Angels. I'm not a Rush aficionado, so I have no idea whether the source material is a song or album, but if it's a song, it's got to be a really boring one.
At one point during the issue, the editor–or writer Steve Gerber–apologizes for the visual madness in Gerber’s script. This apology is for the reader. But given all the insanity Gerber throws together, which ranges from superheroes, Howard the Duck, wizards, barbarians, politicians in big cars and then army guys–not to mention castles, swamps and cosmic walkways–one has to wonder how artist Val Mayerik felt about it.
I guess I didn’t realize–or care–how much Harlan Ellison’s original teleplay for the classic “Star Trek” episode The City on the Edge of Forever got changed.
Conway fills in on both stories–one where the Pied Piper comes up with a new plan to get rich, with Heck on art, and then the Firestorm team-up, with art from Perez and Rodin Rodriguez.
You know, I’ve been talking about limited series spending too much time in their last issue setting up the sequel series but, dang, if Jai Nitz and Greg Smallwood don’t pull it off beautiful for Dream Thief: Escape.
What an issue. In hindsight, it should have seemed unlikely Glass was going to be able to wrap anything up while setting up for the next Mice Templar series.
When I read a comic from Dark Horse called Eye of Newt, even if it’s set in olden times and has dragons and wizards and talking cats and cheap Gollum knockoffs, I expect one thing. I expect an Aliens tie-in.
Bates sure does try hard to get the reader to pay attention. He has another sequence this issue where the Flash discovers some clue and Bates calls out the reader to try to figure it out too. There’s only one problem with it… Bates still writes the revelation scene like the reader didn’t figure it out. So if the reader has figured it out, he or she has wasted some engagement time.
I read a few scenes in The Wicked + The Divine too fast and got confused about whether Jamie McKelvie was drawing boys who look like girls or girls who look like boys. It’s the latter but, dang, was it confusing for a page or so.
Once again, Glass gets a whole lot done in one issue.
This issue, the last one of the “first act”–either to give Romero time to finish the script or Maleev time to get ahead on the art–starts out fairly well.
Even though Bates comes up with a lot of excitement for the Flash this issue–and the reader too–there’s something off about the feature story. Bates and Heck (inking himself to questionable success) put Barry through a bunch of different types of action. There’s a couple regular fights, a supervillain fight, a mid-town disaster sequence with a helicopter getting shot out of the sky, plus all the stuff with Barry’s neighbor thinking he’s trying to kill her.
What a frustrating penultimate issue. It’s intentional on Brubaker’s part, but it doesn’t really matter because even though there’s almost no content to the issue–he reveals one big, deep dark defining secret of Jo’s, but it’s handled so matter-of-factly it doesn’t have much weight–even though there’s nothing to it, there’s Phillips’s art.
Trippy might be the best word for this issue. There’s a lengthy hallucination, mystical sequence as the finale, but Glass is constantly spinning the reader around before it. Actually, having a dream sequence is the most straightforward thing he does this issue. Everything before is much less so.
I’m not sure if there’s a better formula for Minimum Wage; Fingerman might have found it. It balances out all the content between humor, outlandish humor and self-observation. There’s some time spent on Rob’s love life, then a lengthy comedic subplot, then some stuff with his male friends. Not too much with them, but enough for the pop culture references (though Fingerman opens with a great one and it’s Rob and the girl) and manly one liners.
The way Cary Bates writes The Flash, there’s nothing super-speed can’t accomplish. But it’s so darn likable, it’s hard to get stopped up by the severe gaps in logic. Maybe not gaps… canyons. Canyons in logic.
The Stop Button 